a5c7b9f00b On its maiden voyage in April 1912, the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. This is a 30-minute black-and-white movie, the first that dealt with the sinking of the Titanic, which happened only shortly before this was made. The writer and director was Romanian-born Mime Misu, but the film&#39;s cast actually included very actors and directors who became truly prolific in the years after this was made, much more prolific than Misu.<br/><br/>In this short film, we are basically told the story of a sinking ship, but it starts right away much earlier and quite a while before the crash. Even if this was made over 100 years ago, I still found it looks much older, like from the late 19th century. Also the story is not too interesting. It seemed Misu wanted to make a movie on the sinking at any cost and rush it instead of going for a more convincing and maybe time-consuming effort. A pity. The way it actually turned out here, I would not recommend the watch. This isn&#39;t actually the first &quot;Titanic&quot; dramatisation ever made - the unfortunate actress Dorothy Gibson, who had the misfortune to travel on board the liner, was apparently rushed into a hasty reconstruction almost without being given time to change out of the clothes she had been shipwrecked in - but it is the oldest now surviving. And considereda drama, it has most of the features that tend to make films of this era heavy going today - title cards that narrate what is about to happen before the cast proceed to act it out for the viewer, windmilling gestures in place of reaction shots (moreover, the director clearly had very little idea what occurred on the bridge of a ship beyond sweeping the horizon with binoculars), and some very primitive special effects.<br/><br/>What makes it interesting is the fact that it was, in fact, made at the era of the disaster, and hence preserves details that other films laboriously reconstruct: in 1912 they *knew* how a trans-Atlantic liner boarded her passengers and loaded her luggage, and what the cast would be wearing - because they were simply their everyday clothes. There are some fascinating pieces of (naturally) German archive footage spliced into the opening of the film,well, including a shot of a full-rigged ship supposedly approaching the &quot;Titanic&quot;. And the contrast between the early exterior shots, apparently using a real ship faked up to resemble the &quot;Titanic&quot; more closely, and the obvious model-work required to represent the iceberg is instructive.<br/><br/>Ironically I found this film to be of most interest before the iceberg came into view, at which point -a story - it becomes rather ineffective.
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330 weeks ago